The desire to field space-based telescopes with apertures in excess of 10 meter diameter is forcing the development of extreme lightweighted large optomechanical structures. Sparse apertures, shell optics, and membrane optics are a few of the approaches that have been investigated and demonstrated. Membrane optics in particular have been investigated for many years. The MOIRE approach in which the membrane is used as a transmissive diffractive optical element (DOE) offers a significant relaxation in the control requirements on the membrane surface figure, supports extreme lightweighting of the primary collecting optic, and provides a path for rapid low cost production of the primary optical elements. Successful development of a powered meter-scale transmissive membrane DOE was reported in 2012. This paper presents initial imaging results from integrating meter-scale transmissive DOEs into the primary element of a 5-meter diameter telescope architecture. The brassboard telescope successfully demonstrates the ability to collect polychromatic high resolution imagery over a representative object using the transmissive DOE technology. The telescope includes multiple segments of a 5-meter diameter telescope primary with an overall length of 27 meters. The object scene used for the demonstration represents a 1.5 km square complex ground scene. Imaging is accomplished in a standard laboratory environment using a 40 nm spectral bandwidth centered on 650 nm. Theoretical imaging quality for the tested configuration is NIIRS 2.8, with the demonstration achieving NIIRS 2.3 under laboratory seeing conditions. Design characteristics, hardware implementation, laboratory environmental impacts on imagery, image quality metrics, and ongoing developments will be presented.
The ability to fabricate 4-level diffractive structures with 1 µm critical dimensions has been demonstrated for the creation of fast (∼f/3.1 at 633 nm) Fresnel zone lenses (FZLs) with >60% diffraction efficiency into the -1 focusing order and nearly complete suppression of 0 and +1 orders. This is done using tooling capable of producing optics with 800 mm apertures. A 4-level grating fabricated in glass at 300 mm aperture is shown to have <15 nm rms holographic phase error. Glass FZLs have also been used as mandrels for casting zero-thermal-expansion, 20 µm thick polymer films created with the 4-level structure as a route to mass replication of efficient diffractive membranes for ultralight segmented space-based telescope applications.
The MOIRE optical space system, being designed by Ball Aerospace and its partners for DARPA, is a gossamer structure featuring a 10 meter diameter membrane optical element at a distance 50 meters away from the spacecraft bus, with traceability to a 20 meter primary optic diameter system. During launch, the system is tightly packed to fit within the payload fairing and, once on station, it relies on intricate mechanism design to deploy to its final configuration. Pointing control, optical stability, weight, and stiffness requirements drive efforts in finely optimized structural design. This paper reviews these challenges and focuses on those pertaining to membrane stability and survivability and the novel solutions developed to meet them.
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